Performing Femininity: Woman As Performer In Early Russian Cinema (Kino - The Russian And Soviet Cinema)

Oriental dancers, ballerinas, actresses and opera singers the figure of the female performer is ubiquitous in the cinema of pre-Revolutionary Russia. From the first feature film, Romashkov's Stenka Razin (1908), through the sophisticated melodramas of the 1910s, to Viskovsky's The Last Tango (1918), made shortly before the pre-Revolutionary film industry was dismantled by the new Soviet government, the female performer remains central. In this groundbreaking new study, Rachel Morley argues that early Russian film-makers used the character of the female performer to explore key contemporary concerns from changing conceptions of femininity and the emergence of the so-called New Woman, to broader questions concerning gender identity. Morley also reveals that the film-makers repeatedly used this archetype of femininity to experiment with cinematic technology and develop a specific cinematic language."

• | Author: Rachel Morley
• | Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• | Publication Date: July 29, 2021
• | Number of Pages: 304 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1350242861
• | ISBN-13: 9781350242869